The Feminist Spectator ruminates on theatre, performance, film, and television, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, other identities and overlaps, and our common humanity. It addresses how the arts shape and reflect our lives; how they participate in civic conversations; and how they serve as a vehicle for social change and a platform for pleasure. It’s accessible to anyone committed to the arts’ political meanings.

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

David Henry Hwang has long chronicled the
complications of Asian and western cultures clashing with mostly deleterious
effects. His play M. Butterfly, which premiered on Broadway in 1988, famously
narrated the story of a western diplomat who lived in China and fell in love
with a communist spy he thought was a woman.
With deft comedy and captivating theatricality, Hwang illustrated the Orientalism
endemic to the west, as white people persistently project their fantasies of
the “Other” onto those unlike themselves.
The production made a star of B.D. Wong, who played Song Liling and
marked one of the stage highlights of Jon Lithgow’s long and distinguished
career.

In his latest play, Chinglish, in a very funny, smart Broadway production directed by
Leigh Silverman after a successful run at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre last summer,
Hwang once again addresses mismatched cultures from the perspective of a white
businessman, this time from Cleveland, who’s taken himself to China to stir up
business for his family’s failing signage company. Daniel (Gary Wilmes) hires Peter (Stephen
Pucci), an Englishman who’s lived in China for nearly 20 years, as a local
“consultant” to help him translate not just the Chinese language, but also the
complicated mores of the local culture, on which successful business deals
depend. But as the Chinese officials
with whom Daniel would do business bring along their own native translator,
differences of meaning and failures of communication abound.

With most of the Chinese characters speaking
Mandarin, the English translation is projected for the theatre audience as supertitles
and most of the humor lodges in our syncopated reading of the translations as
they’re posed against their intended meanings.
The very problem Daniel offers to solve—the poorly translated signs in
newly built cultural institutions meant to impress western audiences (a
handicapped bathroom sign reads “Deformed Man Toilet”)—hobbles his business
dealings, as the Chinese translator sitting in on his first meeting with local
bureaucrats ineptly delivers his proposal.

Peter isn’t much better at greasing the wheels of
business, caught up as he is in the “backstage” dealings that seed capitalist
relationships in the communist state.
The Englishman plans to succeed by relying on an exchange of favors that
promptly backfires, stranding him and his American friend without a deal
prospect.

But from behind the scenes comes Xi Yan (Jennifer
Lim), the Chinese second-in-command who sits mostly silent and stern at the initial
meeting, while her bumbling male boss performs the obsequious fawning that’s
meant to flatter the American while not providing Daniel any true
satisfaction. When Xi Yan offers to meet
with Daniel over a meal, she dismisses Peter and proceeds to reveal the
“backstage” story in halting English that brings its own set of hilarious
misunderstandings.

Jennifer Lim as Xi Yan and Gary Wilmes as Daniel

But unlike her superior, Xi Yan is no fool. She’s a sharp businesswoman who understands
the complex equation of Chinese business acumen with an ethical system of
checks and balances that requires compromise to protect private honor. When she and Daniel begin an affair, her same
unsentimental, sophisticated analysis of global power dynamics infuses her
tryst. Silverman directs Lim to
literally let down her hair in her bedroom scenes with Daniel, but instead of a
typical transformation into a simpering sex kitten (the stereotype that
underlies the stern business woman or worse, “librarian” figure), Xi Yan
retains her agency. She’s after
pleasure, not a relationship, and soundly rejects Daniel’s belief that sex
leads to love and then to marriage.

The gender politics of the play are as interesting
here as they were in M. Butterfly,
though these many years later, Hwang allows an actual woman to deliver the
critique of American Orientalism.
Enjoying their passionate affair, Daniel begins to get carried away with
romance, suggesting that he and Xi Yan leave their respective marriages to be
together, as people in love are supposed to do, according to his American fantasies.

But Xi Yan is horrified by this idea,
protesting that if he leaves his wife, he’ll threaten her own marriage, which
is built not on some western notion of eternal sentimental love, but on a much
more pragmatic understanding of partnership and mutual public benefit. In fact, Xi Yan’s business machinations with
Daniel increase the political standing of her husband, Xu Geming (Johnny Wu), a
judge who is subsequently promoted to mayor.
That Xi Yan can keep squarely separate public politics from private
pleasure makes her the more powerful of the couple. At the end, Daniel can only ruefully go on
with his life and enjoy the successful business contract his relationship with
Xi Yan enabled.

The play is full of wry and pointed observations
about gender, as well as nationality and race.
Played by Wilmes with hapless magnetism and bemused patience, Daniel is
a sweet nebbish of a guy, desperate to succeed in an environment about which he
knows virtually nothing. He’s
middle-aged, handsome in a regular sort of way, and not particularly sexy,
though the more elegant and sophisticated Xi Yan thinks him compatible. Lim performs Xi Yan with precise comic
control, never sacrificing the character’s dignity to get a laugh, and infusing
her sexuality with the perfect balance of desire and agency. Hers is a terrific performance of a role that
could easily sink into cardboard stereotype.

Daniel finds his erotic and corporate quotient
surprisingly elevated when he admits that he worked for Enron; he becomes a
minor celebrity in a Chinese context in which crooks like Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey
Skilling are seen as heroes. The Chinese
make grand assumptions about Daniel’s proximity to the company’s power
structure, which establishes more credibility than he has or probably deserves.

But with such a counter-misunderstanding, Hwang
this time around evens the playing field.
In M. Butterfly, the
playwright’s excoriating critique showed up western men’s projections of
otherness and eroticism onto Asian women, seeing them as wounded butterflies in
need of white male protection. That Song
Liling turned out to be quite a virile young man instead of a helpless woman
only underlined Hwang’s critique of the west’s insistent feminization of
eastern cultures.

In Chinglish,
the cultural misapprehensions are mutual, allowing Hwang to portray an
international scene in which both countries share responsibility for
perpetuating their own miscommunications.
At the same time, Hwang clarifies that the fledgling capitalism in China
needs western-style business and vice versa, that their transactions are a
matter of mutual survival.

The cast is uniformly terrific. Many play multiple roles, from Party
apparatchiks to local officials.
Silverman keeps the tone even and light throughout, allowing the play’s
humor to sound without sacrificing Hwang’s more serious underlying intent. The evening moves smoothly—the set
(beautifully designed by David Korins) folds into and out of itself into
various locations, from the lobby of a swanky hotel to one of its rooms, to the
bureaucrats’ office and back again, using the actors to help punctuate and
enliven the frequent transitions.

Chinglish
ultimately isn’t as transformational a play as M. Butterfly¸ whose intense theatricality alone made it
memorable. Chinglish remains realist throughout, and banks on the humor of its
mistranslations to strike home its points.
But the evening succeeds in making amused spectators think about
national and cultural differences and how we traverse them, along with the
social complications of navigating global capitalism in an increasingly
interconnected world.

About Me

I'm a writer who loves going to the theatre and the movies, watching television, reading novels, and then thinking about what all of it means. I teach at Princeton University, in the English Department and in the Lewis Center for the Arts Theatre Program. I also direct Princeton's Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I believe in quality writing about the arts and the importance of the arts to social life. I also believe the arts do and should give us pleasure and hope, as well as inspiring our creativity and a more expansive sense of what our lives together can be.